Salman Rushdie, who is respected as a novelist but is a full-blown celebrity for having had a price put on his head by the leader of Iran, will be in Indianapolis this spring to celebrate Indianapolis-born writer Kurt Vonnegut.

Rushdie will be the keynote speaker April 11 at a Vonnegut-themed party at the Athenaeum, 401 E. Michigan St. Tickets start at $50. If you go you're supposed to dress like it's 50 years ago because that's when Vonnegut (born Indianapolis, 1922) published his masterpiece, "Slaughterhouse-Five." The event is sponsored by the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.

"Slaughterhouse-Five," now considered one of the best books ever written in English, came out in March 1969. Six weeks later, Vonnegut — by then a resident of Massachusetts — returned to Indy to hawk his new release. But at a book signing here he attracted little attention: He sold three copies, and he later confided in a letter to his friend and fellow Indianapolis-born writer Dan Wakefield, "all of them to relatives."

Elsewhere, however, the book caught on fast and made a giant celebrity of Vonnegut, who is now embraced by his old hometown. There's a 40-foot mural of him on Mass Ave., and the KVML, a nonprofit group devoted to his life and work, was founded shortly after his death, in 2007.

Vonnegut was never targeted for death by a foreign leader (unless you count his front-line service fighting the Germans during World War II), but one time some of his fellow Americans rose up against him. In November 1973, 32 copies of "Slaughterhouse-Five" were burned in the incinerator of a North Dakota high school on orders of the school board, which considered the book profane.

Vonnegut fired off a blistering but measured letter to the school board president that said, in part, "If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own."

The threat to Rushdie was darker. In 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's spiritual leader, issued a fatwa against Rushdie, an execution order, for what he considered Rushdie's insulting of Islam in his just-released "The Satanic Verses."

Several people connected with the book were attacked, one fatally. For years Rushdie laid low, stayed vigilant. He hired bodyguards. In 1998 the fatwa was eased though not lifted entirely. Today Rushdie jokes about it. He made a cameo on the HBO sitcom "Curb Your Enthusiasm," where he advised the show's star, Larry David, whose character recently got his own fatwa, on the benefits of "fatwa sex."

Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922 and spent his formative years here. He was from a prominent and cultured old Indianapolis family. He played tennis at the Woodstock Club, he went to school at Shortridge High School. He moved away from the city in his twenties and after that returned only for brief visits though he often credited Indianapolis with making him what he was.

He said this in 1986 to the New York Times: "All my jokes are Indianapolis. All my attitudes are Indianapolis. My adenoids are Indianapolis. If I ever severed myself from Indianapolis, I would be out of business. What people like about me is Indianapolis."

Rushdie has been in Indiana at least twice before. Last spring he was in Bloomington to give a talk and receive an honorary degree from Indiana University. In 2003 he was in Indianapolis, where he gave a talk at Butler University's Clowes Hall. The place was packed. Rushdie read aloud bits from his books that were either so thoughtful or so funny, or both, that when he finished he got a standing ovation.

Earlier in the day Rushdie talked to a small group of Butler students, and was asked how he dealt with the fear of having a bounty placed on his head. "The world is a dangerous place," Rushdie said, "but you just live with it.

"You don't overestimate the power of the enemy."

Contact Star writer Will Higgins at 317-444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.